BobO'Link

I took a look. Almost without exception I can purchase a CD of anything they offer for the same price or less which makes the CD a better choice simply because it provides a physical backup that's easier and less expensive to manage than digital backups. Kind of like what I mentioned about a BR - once they discount the product to account for no physical product, no transportation, etc. it'll become the preferred choice. Until then... it's good for those things where there *is* no physical product *or* things that are OOP and stupidly expensive for physical.

In spite of my negatives - I'll keep them in mind for those exceptions. Thanks!

Adam Tyner

PhantomStranger

WB Discovery said their media sales were down something like $211 million for the last year in their quarterly earnings report.

Josh-da-man

One thing that I notice -- and I don't know if it's true or not -- is that it seems like there aren't as many movies released now as there were pre-pandemic. Saturday Night Live recently did a game show skit where one the questions was to name three movies from the past five years, and it occurred to me that it's actually kind of difficult to do.

So either there are fewer movies... and if seems like we're mostly seeing a big tentpole kind of movie released every other month or so, where five or ten years ago there was at least one notable movie coming out at least every week... or there just isn't a lot of enthusiasm over movies like there once was. Maybe it's down to streaming. Or maybe the shortening window between theatrical and home release has been narrowing. But it seems like the movie experience is just completely muddled between an increase in viewing options and decreasing release windows.

I also think that the pandemic accelerated the natural consumes' migration away from physical media and toward non-physical viewing, and when movies stopped being released it got people out of the habit of picking up discs quicker than it normally would have.

Though if I am correct and there are fewer movies (or at least fewer commercially viable ones) being released, it shouldn't be surprising that the sales are bottoming out.

PhantomStranger

Movies hit streaming so quickly these days that I think it seems like nothing sticks in the theaters except Marvel movies and the biggest blockbusters like Avatar.

DJariya

This graphic is from a few weeks ago. Seems like 4K is slowly getting closer to Blu-ray

TheBang

No, that's just an anomaly due to the release of Black Panther 2. All you have to do is look at the week before and the week after to see a more typical picture:




4K is a niche of a niche. We're already 7 years into the format; it's not going to surpass anything.

morriscroy

Heh.

What would make this absolutely definitive, is if Disney tries to buy up a large theater chain and the antitrust division of the american department of justice allows such a merger to proceed.

morriscroy

I couldn't answer this three movies question either at first, excluding the superhero / tentpole stuff. I had to google to jog my memory of what short lived movies were released in recent years before the pandemic.

Coral

I'm sure inflation plays a factor as well in faster declining sales as well. Rents, food prices, etc. increasing makes buying movies even more unnecessary than it currently is.

And if UHD starts taking more market share away from BD, it'll only be because of BD sales dropping... not really due to UHD sales increase.

BuckNaked2k

A lot of people don't even know UHD exists, much less have an interest in buying any discs.

PhantomStranger

I'd say a good majority of friends and family would have no idea what that acronym even means or applies to. The branding should have incorporated 4K better.

morriscroy

The "holodeck" has better branding than UHD.

Alan Smithee

And a lot of people aren’t sure if DVD still exists, yet they still sell the most.

I’ve felt less urgency to buy many recent movies, the industry is largely to blame for that though as they make them easier to see on streaming first. I normally would’ve bought Space Jam 2 just for completeness sake, but having seen it first for basically free on HBO Max and not even being able to stay awake through it, I’ve passed on it. I think In the Heights was the most recent non-sequel movie I’ve bought, and that was largely to get free shipping on something else. Saw that first on HBOMax also, I like musicals.

Adam Tyner

stvn1974

The studios have made it easier for me to save money by not making movies or TV shows that I find interesting enough to watch once let enough need to own.

Alan Smithee

And the retailers have made it easier for me by either going under or not putting out many discs for sale. I made tons of impulse buys but consider mail orders much harder. I think I did all I could to support them but if that’s the way they want it…

morriscroy

Besides wishful thinking and/or speculation, do you have any evidence for this assertion?

jjcool

Wasn't that the whole point of DIVX? To be a rental format that you could pay a fee to rent for longer, or a larger fee to "own" forever? Of course, if the "company" had the ability to turn on the disc for another rental period, they also had the ability to turn the disc off.

Alan Smithee

In those days Di$ney was really paranoid about piracy and also charged high prices for everything. They only got into regular DVDs reluctantly. Before then they wouldn’t even release some titles on laserdisc because it had no copy protection. DIVX was a dream come true for them- super encryption that nobody even now has broken, and ability to charge for every viewing and even lock out discs entirely if they decided to put something “in the vault” or if it was found to be politically incorrect.

TheBang

Are you sure? Like what? As I recall, Disney had quite an extensive laserdisc catalog.

It's probably breakable now, but why would anyone bother? Every DIVX title is available in already-encryption-broken DVD format.

Adam Tyner

Josh Z

I don't recall Disney withholding anything from Laserdisc, aside from Song of the South (which actually did get a couple of LD releases in Asia).

As TheBang says, the only reason DIVX encryption was never cracked was that everyone knew from Day 1 the format was doomed to failure, and it did indeed fail with remarkable swiftness. Basically, nobody felt it was worth the effort.

morriscroy

For the most part. Though I wouldn't be surprised if one day in the future, some hardcore enthusiasts / hobbyists will figure out an easy way to crack such discs.

As past precedent, undecrypted german U-Boat messages from world war 2 were eventually decrypted by hardcore enthusiasts in the mid 2000s.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Online amateurs crack Nazi codes
BBC NEWS | Technology | Enigma project cracks second code

WeeBey

The 2022 numbers are out for the music industry and CD sales are in free fall again. Also, vinyl unit sales barely grew but revenue up 17% suggesting vinyl is getting more expensive.

Anyway, if you hoped growing CD sales might translate to growing BD sales in the future, it’s not happening.